William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Published: July 24, 2002

William Luther Pierce, an ascetic physics professor who built an organization of young supporters for George Wallace for president into the nation's largest neo-Nazi group, and whose novel ''The Turner Diaries'' was credited by Timothy J. McVeigh with inspiring the Oklahoma City bombing, died yesterday. He was 69.

Four weeks ago, Dr. Pierce, as he preferred to be called, learned that he had terminal cancer and began preparing for others to continue the work of his organization, the National Alliance, said Kevin Strom, editor of its magazine, The National Vanguard.

Dr. Pierce died at noon in the trailer home where he had lived in Hillsboro, W.Va., for 20 years, said Roger DeMarais, another associate.

He died as the leader of another racist group, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations, is seriously ill, leaving a leadership void in the small but violent world of racist organizations. That may benefit the Rev. Matt Hale, a former law school student in East Peoria, Ill., in expanding his World Church of the Creator, a religion that has no deity.

Dr. Pierce was a tenured professor at Oregon State University in 1965 when he grew concerned about the success of the civil rights movement and the rise of a counterculture. He became a follower of George Lincoln Rockwell, the neo-Nazi leader who was shot to death in 1967.

In 1970, Mr. Strom said, Dr. Pierce ''severed his ties with Rockwell's National Socialist White People's Party and he became one of the founding members of the National Youth Alliance, which was an outgrowth of Youth for Wallace.''

Mr. Strom insisted last night that Dr. Pierce was not a heartless racist who sought to provoke others to violence against Jews and racial minorities, but a caring man who believed that America should be home only to people who came from Europe and were not Jews.

''Dr. Pierce was very different from the caricature of him that one sees in the media,'' Mr. Strom said. ''He was not a man motivated by hatred or dislike of other races or other cultures, but by a love for his own people, a deep and profound understanding of the danger that people of European descent are in and by a vision of what we could be in the future.''

Throughout nearly 40 years as a promoter of white supremacy, Dr. Pierce argued on his radio program, in his newspaper and in books that just whites should live in the United States, because ''white people must have living space exclusive to ourselves if the white race is to survive.''

He also said that Jews controlled all the major news media and that therefore no honest reporting was ever done about him.

Mark Pitcavage, the national director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks racist groups, described Dr. Pierce as ''a cold and calculating racist who openly urged a white revolution and who with his books urged people to take violent acts.''

Mr. Pitcavage said Dr. Pierce was a successful businessman, creating a racist-book-publishing venture, National Vanguard Books, and running Resistance Records, the largest publisher of hate records in the world.

''The Turner Diaries'' started as a serial in Dr. Pierce's newspaper, Attack, as what Mr. Strom called ''an adventure story he thought would cause people to want to read the next issue.''

It was self-published in 1978, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, then later reprinted by Lyle Stuart's Barricade Books.

Mr. McVeigh cited the novel as the inspiration for his bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995 in Oklahoma City. When interviewed by mainstream news organizations, Dr. Pierce was noncommittal about the influence that the book might have had on Mr. McVeigh, as well as whether his book had influenced the assassination of Alan Berg, a the host of a radio talk show in Denver, or a Brink's armored-car robbery in California, both crimes carried out by white supremacists.

Dr. Pierce also wrote ''Hunter,'' about a man who kills interracial couples to foment a race war and has to contend with an organized group with the same goal, if not the same strategies. ''Hunter,'' which has sold more than 500,000 copies, was dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, a serial killer whose victims included two white women who said they would date black men.

According to Mr. Strom, Dr. Pierce was born in Atlanta in 1933, grew up in the South and attended a military academy in Texas. He was a graduate of Rice University and had master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Colorado.

Dr. Pierce had children. Mr. Strom said he did not know their names. At his death, Mr. Strom said, Dr. Pierce was not married.